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From the Lab to the Land: Social Entrepreneurs Explore Appropriate ...
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Appropriate Technologies Have Potential, but Can Their Users Access Them? MIT students looking to attack global poverty often focus on inventing low-cost ... For example, failures may prevent a social mission from being accomplished or ...

From the Lab to the Land: Social Entrepreneurs Explore Appropriate Technology Dissemination by dmjue

The MIT Entrepreneurship Review is pleased to introduce our new team of topic experts to our readers. Over the
next four weeks, we will be publishing the articles that each topic expert submitted in their application to join the
MITER team. Today's article is from Diana Jue, a topic expert in the Energy/Cleantech group.
Appropriate Technologies Have Potential, but Can Their Users Access Them?

MIT students looking to attack global poverty often focus on inventing low-cost sustainable technologies. These
livelihood-improving and environment-sustaining technologies include drip irrigation systems, bicycle-powered
machines, and solar cookers. Their goals are to be low-cost, sustainable, and usually small-scale and
decentralized. However, far fewer students fixate on the very real and pressing challenge of getting these
technologies to the customers in need.
On campus, appropriate technologies are all the rage. Their popularity is evident through the demand for
hands-on, design-based D-Lab classes that innovate technological solutions for developing regions and student
groups that strut their stuff at biannual International Development Fairs. Outside of MIT, these technologies are
becoming in vogue as well. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced a national commitment of
$50 million to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which plans to distribute 100 million clean-burning stoves
by 2020. D-Lab founder and instructor, Amy Smith, was featured as one of Time magazine’s “World’s Most
Influential People” in 2010.
When I applied to attend MIT as an undergraduate, I wanted to engineer solar-powered water purifiers and other
technologies for rural Africa. However, after spending some time at MIT, I noticed that many students were
inventing these technologies, but few were successfully disseminating them. The big picture of how to move these
technologies from the lab to the land was not quite painted yet. Globally, philanthropic and government-funded
initiatives were failing; limited funds, changes in management, and shifts in momentum did not lead to
sustainability, scalability, or replicability. Appropriate technologies have been invented, but innovative ways to get
them to their users are still lacking.
From the Lab to the Land through the Market
Today, the school of thought that businesses should help lead the effort to address health, economic, and social
issues in developing countries is growing increasingly popular. Quoting Vinod Khosla, billionaire venture capitalist
and co-founder of Sun Microsystems: “There needs to be more experiments in building sustainable businesses
going after the market for the poor. It has to be done in a sustainable way. There is not enough money to be given
away in the world to make the poor well off.” Also supporting this idea is the late C. K. Prahalad, business
management professor.
The tasks of producing, marketing, selling, and distributing appropriate technologies have been taken up by
“social enterprises”, which apply market-based strategies to achieve a social purpose. Social enterprises include
nonprofits that implement business models to achieve their goals and for-profits whose primary goals are social.
MIT, always in step with the times (or perhaps leading them) has turned toward social entrepreneurship. For
example, in 2006, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition added its Development Track (now the Emerging
Markets Track).
The challenges facing social enterprises are unique. Their target customers are usually invisible to traditional
businesses, which fail to see them as significant market opportunities. Because they are viewed as producing
insufficient tax revenues, governments often fail to provide these people with basic services. The social
enterprises that emerge to fill this gap must be innovative – they must be able to provide their products and
services at an affordable price while facing dispersed and fragmented markets, high transaction costs, high costs
of customer acquisition, poor or nonexistent distribution systems, and limited financing options for the consumers
and the enterprises themselves.

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About Me

I live between Oxford, North Carolina, New York City USA and Panajachel, Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, Central America; build and garden in both. LOVE IT!
Aquarius, Year of the Tiger
Email info and suggestions to CatherineTodd2 (at) gmail (dot) com.